Gunplays: Five Plays on Inner City Violence and Guns

Gunplays is a series of five plays by William Electric Black addressing inner city violence and guns. The idea of these plays is to generate understanding of the social forces behind this scourge that our society has so far been helpless to resist. The debut productions of all five plays in the series were presented by Theater for the New City in New York City. Black launched the Gunplays series in 2013 with “Welcome Home Sonny T,” a drama that spotlighted two significant forces driving the 21st century epidemic of American gun violence: the social impact of alienation and unemployment on young black males and the declining influence of black ministers as a force of stability in affected neighborhoods. The second play in the series, “When Black Boys Die” (2015), is a family drama in which a teenage girl tries to understand the madness of gun violence that has killed her brother and consumed her mother. The third, presented by Theater for the New City for 2016 Gun Awareness Month, is “Death of a Black Man (A Walk By),” a play with hip hop verse, chanting, songs, and poetry in which the audience moves through a neighborhood that experienced gun violence. The fourth, “The Faculty Room” (2017), is a drama that swallows its audience into a schoolhouse in a mandatory lock down because of an imminent gunfight among students. The final play, “Subway Story (A Shooting)” (2018) combines music, poetry, dialogue, movement, and immersive theater in a way that makes it the most unique staging in the series.